It’s the perfect game. End of video.
…wait, no, that’s not right. Hoo boy, I’m gonna get yelled at for this one, aren’t I?
|| MUSIC ||
Firelink Shrine – Dark Souls 1
Taurus Demon – Dark Souls 1
Start a Cult – Cult of the Lamb
Majula – Dark Souls 2
Praise the Lamb – Cult of the Lamb
Onett Theme – Earthbound
Pond – Bugdom
Reflection – Hollow Knight
Outset Island – Zelda Windwaker
|| SHOUTOUTS ||
Thanks to @residentdingus for editing this one together for me!
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#thebacklogs #darksouls #weneedtotalk
46 Comments
Your intro reminds me of jon tron back in the day
Man this was literally my experience with Dark Souls 1. First played it years ago on my PS3 and I gave in to Dark Souls "Just quit, save yourself the hassle, you know you cant beat me" I gave up, started a new list, the list of games ill never beat so i wont even try… I went hollow, I guess you could say.
Funnily enough you brought me back, started watching your challenge runs about 5 months ago. So i downloaded it on my pc a few months later, tried mouse and keyboard which i think really helped because i dont like controllers. Then I did it, I landed thr final strike on Gwyn. I sat there silent for a few minutes just repeating "I did it" in my head. It's like the taunting Dark Souls gives you to quit was it really just giving motivation, maybe a reason to push through, prove it wrong. Then in the end it graces you with the feeling of accomplishment, and would you have guessed it? I started a new game the very next day and beat it in almost half the time. Dark Souls now sits on my favorites games list next to TitanFall 2 and Shadow of the Colossus.
As somome who beat dark souls I can fully say thr ONLY fun or even slightly positive moment I had in my entire playthrough was when I had a glitch that turned the grest tree hollow into a slidig level and effectively got to skip it.
Every other second of the game was just a midersble slog. Every time I beat a boss I didn't get that feeling of exhilerating relief, I just felt annoyance that I was about to have to go through an all new awful unfun area. And each time I was right. There was no new area where I thought it was fun, awful in a different way maybe, but never fun.
I even had my souls obsessed friend warching and guiding my every step of the way so I didn't have a lot of these "what does this mean" moments you brought up but that still doesn't alleviate the glaring flaws in game design.
So much of the game is tight corridors that weapons will bounce off of unless you are standing at the perfect angle, glitches that shunt you out of reality every 4 minutes, losing all of your combined xp and gold on death and it being gone forever if you die a second time before retrieving it
Great vid, still my favorite fs game tied with lost kindoms. I dont think its a masterpiece, the second half is pretty weak imo but I love it anyways.
Man I played ds1 on my xbox360 when I was a teen and I didn't even know English properly.
I do not know what made me love the game so much but maybe because I didn't know English I just fucked around and found out and didn't question it as being the game being weird or confusing?
Because regardless of the game telling me or not I didn't understand English properly anyways.
I love DS, but you explained this very well; DS does a horrible job explaining basic gameplay mechanics and as you mentioned, if you're inexperienced, you won't enjoy this game at first. If FromSoft ever watches these videos, I hope they improve on this very important aspect of gaming.
I played Dark Souls 1 some time ago for the first time. I took the masterkey just because everything else seemed pretty common and i didn't regret it but is there any sense in the others and how do you open the doors were you use the Masterkey ? Some of the doors are pretty important i guess and make the game much easier and i didn't found keys for these doors, i think… Some of the other Items might just be good for some special playstyle maybe like the firebombs but i dont have the feeling that you need them at all.
At the end it’s literally just Stockholm syndrome
You say "I don't need my hand held" but you are literally criticizing the game for not holding the player's hand all the time, what? How many active braincells do you think the average person needs to figure everything you've said out for themselves? That's what I did, what all my friends who started playing Dark Souls at release did, hell I played Demon's Souls on release when I was 14 as one of the first maybe dozen or so videogames I had EVER played and it was the most frustrating and fun shit I'd experienced, the main reason I decided to get into gaming permanently! I finished it back then. The things you bring up, not a single one of them were ever an issue for any of us, whether we'd played Demon's Souls first or not, and it was never an issue for me in Demon's Souls either. You're really making it sound like the average gamer is just an idiot that needs to be guided from start to finish when the things you bring up are complete non-issues. Upgrading weapons, seriously? Understanding the stats? You may have struggled with these things (or not) back in 2011-2012 but Dark Souls' success speaks for itself, it sold over 2 million copies within two years of release and has continued to sell over 6 million copies today, not including the remaster. Clearly people knew what they were getting into back then, and if they don't today then it has nothing to do with From's design choices, it has to do with their brains being hard-wired for years now to require spoon-feeding of information and guides and help due to shitty modern game design.
Currently at the point of “rage quit for 8 months” got stuck in the catacombs and gave up. However this has motivated me to finally complete the journey for the first time. Let’s see how long it takes me
I really fell thats a corelation betwen terraria and dark souls fand, and I love it. Great video with great toughts, keep up with The great content!! Some love from Brazil!
Ugly and full of jank, merchants and blacksmith are all over the god damn place without an easy way to accessed them. Overrated.
Kudos for making a video critiquing DS1 and not even mentioning the Bed of Chaos
Really loved the analysis video. Would def watch an analysis of Ghost of Tsushima
4:45 it is truly unfortunate that the only stat menu in the entire game that does not feature the "explanation" button is the very first one, and one of the most important ones.
That was beautiful
So a pretty small criticism i have for this video (i agree with the vast majority of it) it would probably be wise to not show footage of a midded UI while bringing up flaws with the UI.
The hardest souls game.
I Absolutely agree with all of these flaws but personally i love this level of obscure and unknown in a game
LMAO 😂
" we love DS not in spite of its flaws, but because of it"
Glad at least someone is happy even if ai get my s* kicked in
un-intentional comedy gold
Still think DS1 has the best level/world design of any modern From game. So good at hiding the true scale of the game from you, making every shortcut and hidden area feel so revelatory and special. With the demand to make every game "bigger", not sure we'll ever get that again.
Dark souls was my first rpg so I was super overwhelmed at first by all the different stats on the screen and the different menus and not knowing what equip load was. So I pumped all my points jnto strength to use the drake sword which had 0 scaling because I had no clue what scaling even was, more strength= more damage just felt intuative even though for a lot of weapons it has little to no effect. Also after I finally beat the gargoyles the crestfallen warrior said that there was a bell down bellow so I took the stairs down to new londo and spent way too long trying to progress there before finding out later there was a door on the drake bridge I was supposed to take. Wasn't until I started consuming a whole lot of dark souls content that I was able to learn stuff and actually know how to progress etc. This video is crazy accurate to a blind playthrough.
Also just remembered that my first playthrough I used a mostly raw weapon as I thought that was how you upgraded because I didn't realise after I upgraded to +6 in the ascension menu that I had to go back to the upgrade weapon tab and instead scrolled right and changed to raw not realising what I was doing and so I was really struggling with low damage weapons until yet again I saw videos where they explained the systems
the reason there's instructions on how to use the bow and the pyromancy flame where pick them up is that in the beginning of the game, the very first hallway after you walk out of the cell, there are instructions on the ground on how to swing your sword
edit: how can you do that to our boy Solaire?
when you said you can't two-hand a shield without equipping it to the right hand I immediately had to go test it in my game
and sure enough; I guess I've been spoiled by DS3 where you CAN just do that by holding Y/Triangle
As someone whos very new to the souls series and your channel, I will end it all if i need to go through the catacombs again.
i borrowed demon souls from a friend and returned it immediately after a few hours and said to him keep your damn game and at some point i bought it again and played it through it was awesome
Thanks for saying this. I like these deep dives.
I plan on doing a blind run of Dark Souls at some point (ADHD and my lack of general RAM in my brain means it is indeed blind) and I'll hold the last words you've said close. Here's to losing my humanity!
I bought this game when it came out and quit within 10mins, came back 10 years later to finally play it. I didnt have the patience at the time.
Game bad because confusing. Game bad because I refuse to get on a learning curve. Game bad because different from other games.
God watching people who started with ER and Dark Souls 3 go back to ds1 is so funny. Y’all can’t handle the fact that ds1 isn’t just dodge roll r1 like 3 😂
Picked up the game long ago. 1hr in, I quit. Then I came across the Epicnamebro and pointed me in the right direction. I learned, played, conquered, met Ornstein and Smough and quit again. 21hrs in game trying to kill them broke me. 2 years later of thinking about how they destroyed me had me come back with a new play through. I prepped, I knew what I was in for, 2hrs of fighting them I broke down in tears after I finally beat them. This game is hard, it requires patience and time (sometimes longer for others.) but if you push through you will be rewarded for the perseverance with a dopamine rush unlike any other. I did not beat the game, but maybe in a few more years I can come back and do so, because fuck the bed of chaos!
I bounced off Dark Souls appallingly hard. After throwing about two afternoon at it, I returned it to the friend I’d borrowed it off, beat Ninja Gaiden II on Master Ninja to prove to myself I wasn’t just terrible at games, and swore off the entire series until happenstance put a copy of Bloodborne in front of me. I’ll go back and have another crack at it someday
I love Dark Souls. I also love Elden Ring. Are they masterpieces? Probably. Are they perfect? Hell no. Is there a lot that could've been done differently, and better? For sure.
There's a lot of elitists and super praisers of this series. Especially Elden Ring, there's plenty of people I've spoken to that just can't handle criticisms, and praise the game like it's the best open world ever made. It's not.
If you can't take criticism to your favorite game, you are not a real fan of that game. If you can't give your own criticisms, you are not a real fan or supporter of that title.
Legit had one of my close friends ask if they should play it and I said welll can you handle dying alot at first than sure. They said not really but now two weeks later they love it! soooo honestly it's all on the player a great game! And I have noticed every other game I play I just don't get so frustrated with them so thank you dark souls 😂
I hear you call it flawed and I just think of "Dark Souls 1 is the Vivec of awful code and bad game design."
About the Npc quest lines. They want you to fail some of them on your first play through so that you could do multiple playthroughs
Fun fact nowadays dark souls prepare to die edition costs 300€ yay
Never give up skeleton! This video was amazing thanks for bridging the gap between fans and newbies it is an enlightening perspective
Toblerone.
Don't go hollow
DS1 is a lot more clunky and flawed than people want to admit, DS2 is better than everyone says, and DS3 is good buy a little disappointing becaue combat is too fast and easy. I maintain they took too much from bloodborne. I think that bloodborne is probably the best entry point into souls, but its still locked to PS4 for the time being.
i love dark souls bc if you would just open ur fckng eyes instead of getting mad evrything is just right infront of you.
you could check everything before even starting the game.
in settings you can preview all mechanics and button combos. and there is a goddam button called EXPLANATION everytime you open up your inventory where you can check what every stat does.
Git Gud sir
Great video Lemon! Look forward to more videos in this style.
I am ready to defend! where are the gatekeepers
I love the soulsborne franchise, but i admit trying to start by dark souls remastered was a bit of a pain in the ass, i watched a video talking about dark souls, my friend told me all the amazing lore and that it was so fucking good.
I bought the game, started, and my friend vanished of my group, and that was so bad for me, because i did not have any good help i could rely on except tutorials in youtube, and you dont want to play a game that you have to search and ask almost everything because it wont tell you. But ok, i overcame this and everything was starting to click, i was amazed when i fought the gaping dragon, that repulsive design and a giant fucking thing trying to kill me and defile me idk. But when i got to the second half of the game, almost everything started to get kinda bad, i was at a adrenaline peak and invested, but at the same time the game starts falling down.
I was told in the beggining of gwyn, seath, nito, izalith. But i can only say that I really enjoyed nito and gwyn. Bed of chaos, Reskin stray demon, centipede demon, etc.
That made all the feeling of overcoming difficulties pass, because it was pointless if it was for that.
So o quit the franchise and only went back 2 years later because the same friend told me to play ds3 AND THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME
Most of these problems are features. The game was meant to be explored, not answered in a Wiki page. You really aren't supposed to know what's good, that's the point. Also, the single biggest problem of all time that you didn't mention, the thing that made some of my friends outright quit is missing: THE TUTORIAL KEYBINDS ARE XBOX CONTROLLER ONLY. They literally DO NOT TELL YOU how to use your keyboard. And this shitty port system continues all the way into Dark Souls 3. It is… beyond obtuse.